Off the Top: PHP Entries
Changing Hosts and Server Locations
I’ve been in the midst of thinking through a web host / server move for vanderwal.net for a while. I started running a personal site in 1995 and was running it under vanderwal.net since 1997. During this time it has gone through six of 7 different hosts. The blog has been on three different hosts and on the same host since January 2006.
I’ve been wanting better email hosting, I want SSH access back, more current updates to: OS; scripting for PHP, Ruby, and Python; MySQL; and other smaller elements. A lot has changed in the last two to three years in web and server hosting.
The current shift is the 4th generation that started with simple web page hosting with limited scripting options, but often had some SSH and command line access to run cron jobs. The second was usually had a few scripting options and database to run light CMS or other dynamic pages, but the hosting didn’t give you access to anything below the web directory (problematic when trying to set your credentials for login out of the web directory, running more than one version of a site (dev, production, etc.), and essential includes that for security are best left out of the web directory). The second generation we often lost SSH and command line as those coming in lacked skills to work at the command line and could cripple a server with ease with a minor accident. The third has been more robust hosting with proper web directory set up and access to sub directories, having multiple scripting resources, having SSH and command line back (usually after proven competence), having control of setting up your own databases at will, setting up your own subdomains at will, and more. The third generation was often still hosting many sites on one server and a run away script or site getting hammered with traffic impacted the whole server. These hosts also often didn’t have the RAM to run current generations of tools (such as Drupal which can be a resource hog if not using command line tools like drush that thankfully made Drupal easier to configure in tight constraints from 2006 forward).
Today’s Options
Today we have a fourth generation of web host that replicates upgraded services like your own private server or virtual private server, but at lighter web hosting prices. I’ve been watching Digital Ocean for a few months and a couple months back I figured for $5 per month it was worth giving it a shot for some experiments and quick modeling of ideas. Digital Ocean starts with 512 MB or RAM, 20GB of SSD space (yes, your read that right, SSD hard drive), and 1TB of transfer. The setup is essentially a virtual private server, which makes experimentation easier and safer (if you mess up you only kill your own work not the work of others - to fix it wipe and rebuild quickly if it is that bad). Digital Ocean also lets you setup your server as you wish in about a minute of creation time with OS, scripting, and database options there for your choosing.
In recently Marco Arment has written up the lay of the land for hosting options from his perspective, which is a great overview. I’ve also been following Phil Gyford’s change of web hosting and like Phil I am dealing with a few domains and projects. I began looking at WebFaction and am liking what is there too. WebFaction adds in email into the equation and 100GB of storage on RAID 10 storage. Like Digital Ocean it has full shell scripting and a wide array of tools to select from to add to your server. This likely would be a good replacement for my core web existence here at vanderwal.net and its related services. WebFaction provides some good management interfaces and smoothing some of the rough edges.
There are two big considerations in all of this: 1) Email; 2) Server location.
Email is a huge pain point for me. It should be relatively bullet proof (as it was years ago). To get bullet proof email the options boil down to going to a dedicated mail service like exchange or something like FastMail, a hosted Exchange server, or Google Apps. Having to pester the mail host to kick a server isn’t really acceptable and that has been a big reason I am considering moving my hosting. Also sitting on servers that get their IP address in blocks of blacklisted email servers (or potentially blacklisted) makes things really painful as well. I have ruled out Exchange as an option due to cost, many open scripts I rely on don’t play well with Exchange, and the price related to having someone maintain it.
Google Apps is an option, but my needs for all the other pieces that Google Apps offers aren’t requirements. I am looking at about 10 email addresses with one massive account in that set along with 2 or 3 other domains with one or two email accounts that are left open to catch the stray emails that drift in to those (often highly important). The cost of Google for this adds up quickly, even with using of aliases. I think having one of my light traffic domains on Google Apps would be good, the price of that and access to Google Apps to have access to for experimentation (Google Apps always arise in business conversations as a reference).
FastMail pricing is yearly and I know a lot of people who have been using it for years and rave about it. Having my one heavy traffic email there, as well as tucking the smaller accounts with lower traffic hosted there would be a great setup. Keeping email separate from hosting give uptime as well. FastMail is also testing calendar hosting with CalDAV, which is really interesting as well (I ran a CalDAV server for a while and it was really helpful and rather easy to manage, but like all things calendar it comes with goofy headaches, often related timezone and that bloody day light savings time, that I prefer others to deal with).
Last option is bundled email with web hosting. This has long been my experience. This is mostly a good solution, but rarely great. Dealing with many domains and multitudes of accounts email bundled with web hosting is a decent option. Mail hosting is rarely a deep strength of a web hosting company and often it is these providers that you have to pester to kick the mail server to get your mail flowing again (not only my experience, but darned near everybody I know has this problem and it should never work this way). I am wondering with the benefits of relatively inexpensive mail hosting bundled into web hosting is worth the pain.
I am likely to split my mail hosting across different solutions (the multiple web hosts and email hosts would still be less than my relatively low all in one web hosting I currently have).
Server Location
I have had web hosting in the US, UK, and now Australia and at a high level, I really don’t care where the the servers are located as the internet is mostly fast and self healing, so location and performance is a negligible distance for me (working with live shell scripting to a point that is nearly at the opposite side of the globe is rather mind blowing in how instantaneous this internet is).
My considerations related to where in the globe the servers are hosted comes down to local law (or lack of laws that are enforced). Sites sitting on European hosts require cookie notifications. The pull down / take down laws in countries are rather different. As a person with USA citizenship paperwork and hosting elsewhere, the laws that apply and how get goofy. The revelations of USA spying on its own people and servers has me not so keen to host in the US again, not that I ever have had anything that has come close to running afoul of laws or could ever be misconstrued as something that should draw attention. I have no idea what the laws are in Australia, which has been a bit of a concern for a while, but the host also has had servers in the US as well.
My options seem to be US, Singapore, UK, Netherlands, and Nordic based hosting. Nearly all the hosting options for web, applications, and mail provide options for location (the non-US options have grown like wildfire in the post Edward Snowden era). Location isn’t a deciding point, but it is something I will think through. I chose Australia as the host had great highly recommended hosting that has lived up to that for that generation of hosting options. It didn’t matter where the server was hosted eight years ago as the laws and implications were rather flat. Today the laws and implications are far less flat, so it will require some thinking through.
Developing the Web for Whom?
Google Web Developer Toolkit for the Closed Web
Andrew in his post "Reading user interface libraries" brings in elements of yesterday's discussion on The Battle to Build the Personal InfoCloud. Andrew brings up something in his post regarding Google and their Google Web Developer Toolkit (GWT. He points out it is in Java and most of the personal web (or new web) is built in PHP, Ruby [(including Ruby on Rails), Python, and even Perl].
When GWT was launched I was at XTech in Amsterdam and much of the response was confusion as to why it was in Java and not something more widely used. It seems that by choosing Java for developing GWT it is aiming at those behind the firewall. There is still much development on the Intranet done in Java (as well as .Net). This environment needs help integrating rich interaction into their applications. The odd part is many Intranets are also user-experience challenged as well, which is not one of Google's public fortés.
Two Tribes: Inter and Intra
This whole process made me come back to the two differing worlds of Internet and Intranet. On the Internet the web is built largely with Open Source tools for many of the big services (Yahoo, Google, EBay, etc.) and nearly all of the smaller services are Open Source (the cost for hosting is much much lower). The Open Source community is also iterating their solutions insanely fast to build frameworks (Ruby on Rails, etc.) to meet ease of development needs. These sites also build for all operating systems and aim to work in all modern browsers.
On the Intranet the solutions are many times more likely to be Java or .Net as their is "corporate" support for these tools and training is easy to find and there is a phone number to get help from. The development is often for a narrower set of operating systems and browsers, which can be relatively easy to define in a closed environment. The Google solution seems to work well for this environment, but it seems that early reaction to its release in the personal web it fell very flat.
13 Reasons
A posting about Top 13 reasons to CONSIDER the Microsoft platform for Web 2.0 development and its response, "Top 13 reasons NOT to consider the Microsoft platform for Web 2.0 development" [which is on a .Net created site] had me thinking about these institutional solutions (Java and .Net) in an openly developed personal web. The institutional solutions seem like they MUST embrace the open solutions or work seamlessly with them. Take any one of the technical solutions brought up in the Microsoft list (not including Ray Ozzie or Robert Scoble as technical solutions) and think about how it would fit into personal site development or a Web 2.0 developed site. I am not so sure that in the current state of the MS tools they could easily drop in with out converting to the whole suite. Would the Visual .Net include a Python, PHP, Ruby, Ruby On Rails, or Perl plug-in?The Atlas solution is one option in now hundreds of Ajax frameworks. To get use the tools must had more value (not more cost or effort) and embrace what is known (frogs are happy in warm water, but will not enter hot water). Does Atlas work on all browsers? Do I or any Internet facing website developer want to fail for some part of their audience that are using modern browsers?
The Web is Open
The web is about being browser agnostic and OS agnostic. The web makes the OS on the machine irrelevant. The web is about information, media, data, content, and digital objects. The tools that allow us to do things with these elements are increasingly open and web-based and/or personal machine-based.
Build Upon Open Data and Open Access
The web is moving to making the content elements (including the microconent elements) open for use beyond the site. Look at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the open APIs in the Yahoo Developer Network. Both of these companies openly ease community access and use of their content and services. This draws people into Amazon and Yahoo media and properties. What programming and scripting languages are required to use these services? Any that the developer wants.. That is right, unlike Google pushing Java to use their solution, Amazon and Yahoo get it, it is up to the developer to use what is best for them. What browsers do the Amazon and Yahoo solutions work in? All browsers.
I have been watching Microsoft Live since I went to Search Champs as they were making sounds that they got it too. The Live Clipboard [TechCrunch review] that Ray Ozzie gave at O'Reilly ETech is being developed in an open community (including Microsoft) for the whole of the web to use. This is being done for use in all browsers, on all operating systems, for all applications, etc. It is open. This seems to show some understanding of the web that Microsoft has not exhibited before. For Microsoft to become relevant, get in the open web game, and stay in the game they must embrace this approach. I am never sure that Google gets this and there are times where I am not sure Yahoo fully gets it either (a "media company" that does not support Mac, which the Mac is comprised of a heavily media-centric community and use and consume media at a much higher rate than the supported community and the Mac community is where many of the trend setters are in the blogging community - just take a look around at SXSW Interactive or most any other web conference these days (even XTech had one third of the users on Mac).
Still an Open Playing Field
There is an open playing field for the company that truly gets it and focusses on the person and their needs. This playing field is behind firewalls on Intranet and out in the open Internet. It is increasingly all one space and it continues to be increasingly open.
Make Nice with Mobile Users Easily
Those interested in making friendly with their mobile users trying to consume their content aimed at the desktop browser market should take a peek at Make Your Site Mobile Friendly by Mike Davidson. This is one method that makes for a little less sweat and keeps some dollars in our budgets for other needs.
RSS on PDAs and information reuse
Three times the past week I have run across folks mentioning Hand/RSS for Palm. This seems to fill the hole that AvantGo does not completely fill. Many of the information resources I find to be helpful/insightful have RSS feeds, but do not have a "mobile" version (more importantly the content is not made with standard (X)HTML validating markup with a malleable page layout that will work for desktop/laptop web browsers and smaller mobile screens).
I currently pull to scan then read content from 125 RSS feeds. Having these some of these feeds pulled and stored in my PDA would be a great help.
Another idea I have been playing with is to pull and convert RSS feeds for mobile browser access and use. This can be readily done with PHP. It seems that MobileRSS already does something like this.
Content, make that information in general, stored and presented in a format that is only usable in one device type or application is very short sighted. Information should be reusable to be more useful. Users copy and paste information into documents, todo lists, calendars, PDAs, e-mail, weblogs, text searchable data stores (databases, XML respositories, etc.), etc. Digital information from the early creation was about reusing the information. Putting text only in a graphic is foolish (AIGA websites need to learn this lesson) as is locking the information in a proprietary application or proprietary format.
The whole of the Personal Information Cloud, the rough cloud of information that the user has chosen to follow them so that it is available when they need that information is only usable if information is in an open format.
Extending Dreamweaver MX for PHP
O'Reilly Net offers Getting Dreamweaver MX Up to Speed with PHP, which discusses how to get and build the Dreamweaver extension you need to build PHP-based sites. Macromedia is now charging for the newest extensions (their perogative), but this article points out how to get the extensions you need for sessions and authentication.
PHP 5 for the Enterprise
A solid overview of PHP 5 and the Enterprise in Open Enterprise give insight in to the power and growth PHP is gaining and undergoing. PHP puts up a solid fight with ASP 3 and is often the better solution for many, if not most projects/products.PHP Architect mag launches
The PHP Architect Magazine launched, which seems would make a wonderful pairing to The Perl Journal (TPJ). This could be two great resources produced for those that believe in the power and stability of open source scripting.Happy anniversary OtT Tool
Yesterday, October 31st was the one year anniversary of this weblog's home rolled CMS (Content management system). In the past year I have posted 722 entries, set 142 keywords to classify and cross-classify these posts, had 122 comments posted, and had 2,055 category entries in the database to help find related information posted.
This was a wonderful step as the tool did exactly what I wanted it to do. Mostly stay functional and usable from where ever I am. I had started rolling it about six months before it went live and used it as my "travelblog". I had been hand coding every entry for six months to a year, which was getting to be a drag. To post hand coded posts I needed FTP capability, which was not available everywhere. I could find a web browser much more easily. This was functionality I found I had with Blogger, which I started playing with out of curiosity with the interface and desktop application like functionality.
I have been asked why I do not use one of the other all ready rolled tools. I like what I built and it works for me. I can also add functionality to it that I want to play with. Some of the lack of functionality is my own lack of time or motivation on with this tool, but it because of me. I also like the quick responsiveness when posting comments and the general posts themselves.
Here is to another year and more, with time to add everything I want to add.
Yahoo does PHP
Yahoo presentation on why they are moving to PHP. This would make a great interview of write-up as PowerPoint presentations are largely worthless with out the speaking that accompanies them. This is one presentation that has a tiny bit of information that makes me crave for more. I use PHP here as a scripting language of choice. I love being able to use it at work for many of the reasons outlined by Yahoo. It is better than ColdFusion, ASP, or JSP as far a server requirements, secure, and time to market. The flexability and speed which one can develop is tough to beat, except for the flexability of Perl (there is a reason it is called the duct tape of the Internet). The maxim has been use PHP where you can and Perl where you must. Other languages pale in comparison, but have marketing dollars, which drive the hype. [hat tip Cam and Anil]Apache 2.0 builds for OS X
Hmmm... Yesterday I was looking at Apache and the other two pieces of the triumvirate PHP and MySQL. Today I ran across what could be an improved option, Server Logistics' Apache 2.0 along with Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Postgres. Apache 2.0 provides multithreading and other improvements to the incredibly stable and supreme Web server All of this is set to build and run on Mac OX 10.Mac server on a laptop
I did not go to the OS X 10.2 Launch last night (I was having a wonderful time at Fred and Paula's birthday gathering), but I may be picking up Jaguar shortly. When I do so I will revert back to the base Apache build in OS X. After this it will on to O"Reilly Net's Setting up a Site Server article and Marc Liyange pages. It seems when I upgraded the base Apache build on OS X the PHP builds from Liyange were not running properly as they are based on the default builds from OS X.PHP development with Apple's OS X Developer Tools
Apple provides information to use Apple's Developer Tools (for OS X) to build PHP. This will be a very nice mobile tool.Digital Web needs your help
Are you looking for a great project to volunteer your time? Digital Web Magazine is still looking for people with the following skills to help with the redesign and weekly publication:- graphic designer (print and web / Illustrator / Photoshop)
- information architect (site flow / Visio)
- logo designer (branding / Illustrator / Photoshop)
- web designer (layout / Photoshop)
- web developer (markup / hand-coding)
- web programmer (backend / SQL / PHP)
- writers (word or text)
- curators (linkbot, webtrends)
- editors (word or text)
Code PHP efficiently
Code PHP efficiently, from evolt.PHP and MySQL for managing images on the Web
Managing Images With a Web Database Application with PHP and MySQL and nothing up the sleeves. The folks from O'Reilly Net offer this one, which is not in the Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL. The book is one of my favorite information application development books at the moment for a variety of reasons: ease of coding principles, explaining application development, explaination, then using what is learned and implementing it.Need to get your hands on OS X packages. I have found this page many times and now mabye I can find it on a regular basis.
So you want to build your own weblog tool like the one here? Start with PHP and MySQL with a little Apache and a sprinkling of arrays and script code. Yes, this is basically what is under this puppy.
PHP with Java tutorial over at Dev Shed. Why not JSP? PHP is quicker to write and quicker to run.
Not that I personally need this at the end of the month, but Joao Prado Maia writes about Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications (benchmarking PHP) on O'Reilly Net. The article shows us how to place scripts within our scripts that allow us to capture times so to know where we could spend our time focussing on making PHP run more quickly.
PHP has a security hole that warrants a patch/upgrade ASAP. Hopefully you are running PHP on server with a recent version of Apache so that it is built in using Apache's dynamic modules. This will make the upgrade a breeze. Fortunately my Web host had upgraded this server to PHP 4.1.2 prior to the news coming out. My host? PHP Web Hosting.
The solution to the = in the link is to use  in its place. This may require a solid tweak to my home-rolled weblog application so to sniff, parse, and replace the symbol prior to inserting into the database.
Arg, running into issues in links when the link has an equal sign followed by a number or two (") does not look like (=22). This will take some playing around as I am using the "quoted_printable_decode" in php to print things properly.
Kevin Fox adds New to You functionality to his site. This is the best idea I have run across in a while. It is a great idea that beats the problems I find on sites I frequent often. It also seems to cover the territory between visited links and not providing them. [hat tip Dinah]
Matt makes observations of the state of severs and scripting deployments. I agree with nearly all of what Matt point out. Some of the reasoning behind the varying set-ups is for security reason's, others are to mirror configurations on other servers that had slightly different purposes. In all, what this needs is a solid documentation tool. PHP provides some of this with a function that prints out the build of the server that script resides on, this is usually the first task many of us perform on a machine. This however, is just the tip of the iceberg of the information we need.
This is part of the second and fourth element of the cornerstones of information application development (info apps need to be usable, maintainable, reliable, and repeatable). If a task is difficult to maintain and even harder to repeat there is some work that needs to be done to change the environment or the application.
There is nothing like starting the New Year coding a time rollover code to pull the current information out of your weblog. This means I now have fully functioning code for month and year change overs in my personally built weblog tool. This also means I still love PHP more than any other scritping/Web coding language.
It is getting to be time to pull the code out of the PHP templates and make it more modular/object based. The site is built on a handful of templates that reuse about 75% of the same code to build the pages. From this stage it is time to pull out classes and functions and have each page point to the proper elements. This enables me (or who everelse is getting this code) to be able to make modifications in one place rather than many.
Why modular/object-based? This is how the world works. This is how things are done efficiently. This is the non-foolish way of building applications. (Looks like I am starting this year on a testy note).
one.point.zero has integrated some very nice design elements into the site. It is nice to read that it is build using PHP scripts, but that is not important, the ease of reading and using the elements around the site make it worthy of examination. The site cleanly integrates some ideas that I have had on my to do list, like the calendar. This sets a nice high benchmark for personal sites. Bravo. [hat tip Jeffery]
Those looking for a good overview of PHP should head to Webmonkey's PHP from the Ground Up article. This will give you enough information to make you dangerous or at least give you an idea of how to make the Web a better place. [hat tip Charles Johnson at LGF]
Part 2 of the PHP security issues, which explains how to shore up your PHP application builds.
On Earthweb, Jordan Dimov, provides PHP securtiy guidence. Some of this is a restating of known holes, which have been closed, or can be closed. It is good to read through this just to be safe.
ASP2PHP does a solid job handling converting ASP (active server pages) to PHP. The report that Sun sponsored to hopefully show JSP (java server pages) taking over the site scripting market, not only showed JSP had shrunk in market share, but ASP had dropped drastically. The big winner in this survey was Perl with about 40 percent of the market and PHP was ahead of ASP.
Microsoft has given itself problems with ASP this past year or so as the next generation of ASP requires complete rewrites of your ASP code to work on the next version of server. The code is different enough that it will not port, it must be rewritten. This stopped ASP development to a large degree. Some folks have tried running ASP on UNIX with ChiliSoft, but that is only advisable as a patch until you can recode the application, as it is quite resource intensive and you adding another layer of interpretation, which never helps.